SECOND SCREEN

There’s something wrong about X-men growing old, especially the hitherto immortal-seeming Wolverine, who, according to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, has fought in just about every battle since the American Civil War. But as Logan (16) ★★★ gets under way, somewhere in a future near enough to look familiar but also encompass driverless trucks, he’s definitely feeling his age. He’s slower, weaker and regularly ends up on the wrong end of a whupping… until, of course, he gets really angry and then the normal pecking order is bloodily restored. Poor Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) is in an even worse state. Locked away in a grain silo, he appears to be in the early stage of dementia, which, for a mutant of his telepathic and telekinetic powers, is bad news all round. When he has a seizure, everybody knows about it. At least he’s got the albino Caliban (Stephen Merchant) to look after him.

Even Logan (Hugh Jackman, left) – Wolverine’s name when he’s not in his bullet-proof, razor-knuckled mode – pops in every now and again, that is when he’s not drinking or driving hen-night parties around Las Vegas in his stretch limo. The X-men have clearly fallen on very hard times indeed.

And then a Mexican woman with a rather strange little girl in tow appears asking for help. And there’s something about the intense, volatile little girl that seems oddly familiar.

Now, Logan and Prof X are two of my favourite X-men characters but this third spin-off – directed by James Mangold, who also did the second, The Wolverine – from a main franchise now 17 years old, is too unrelentingly dark and violent for me.

I’ve never known Prof X swear as much as he does here… while the moment a gun-wielding ‘security contractor’ pistol-whips a young boy crystallised a thought that had been coming for a while. If this is some sort of a farewell, then, sad to say, it’s much too nasty for me.